How To Steal a Car Read Online Free

show called Flipper on TV Land. It was about this really smart dolphin who saved the day in every episode. I got all excited about dolphins—or porpoises, as they are also called. So for my tenth birthday my dad gave me a dolphin necklace. It was just a chain with this dolphin carved out of soapstone, but it was nice of him to remember that I liked Flipper.
    I wore it to school, and of course everybody noticed and said how cool it was. A few days later, this girl Madison who wanted to be my friend gave me a pencil with an eraser shaped like a dolphin. I didn’t really want to be her friend because I already had Jen, but I said thank you and used the pencil at school. And then my mom bought me a new bedspread that had jumping dolphins on it. Pretty soon, for birthdays, Christmas, or no reason at all, people were giving me dolphin things and I didn’t know how to make them stop. I didn’t even like Flipper anymore. So one day—it was about a week before my thirteenth birthday—I had a completedolphin meltdown. I took every dolphin thing I owned and made a pile in the backyard fire pit and poured half a can of gasoline on it. My mom noticed me out there and came out to see what I was doing with my bedspread and stuffed dolphins and dolphin posters and dolphin T-shirts and everything else piled up in the fire pit, and I lit it.
    Gasoline is more flammable than I’d thought. There was a huge whoosh! and I jumped back, but not quick enough. I ended up losing all the hairs on my right arm, my right eyebrow, and some off my bangs too. Fortunately, my clothes didn’t catch on fire. My mom freaked, of course, and so did my dad when he got home. You’d have thought it was the worst thing anybody had ever done in the history of people doing bad things. But I didn’t feel all that bad about it until my dad said, “Did you burn the necklace too?”
    Actually, it was the one thing I kept. But I didn’t tell him that.
    I was grounded for a week and they made me see a therapist. After a couple hours of taking tests and talking and crying, the therapist told my parents I was a normal kid who sometimes had difficulty expressing her feelings. She also told them not to give me any more dolphin stuff.
    I mention this because it sort of relates to what later happened with Alton Wright’s Hummer. Because people just love to know things about you, as in Kelleigh Monahan has a dolphin fetish or Stuey Kvasnick has only one testicle or Kathy Forest will do it with any guy who smiles at her. Anything that makes you predictable and classifiable, like it gives them a mental file drawer to put you in and forever after that’s where they keep you. It only takes one thing for them to create that file.
    Even your closest friends.
    Will called me up a week after the first car thing and said, “Hey.”
    “Hey,” I said back.
    “Doing anything Saturday?”
    “Why?”
    “I need a favor.”
    The Hummer dealership was only four blocks from the car wash. The guy at the service counter took the key without looking at me. He asked me my name. I told him it was Cordelia Fink. He set the key on the counter, typed something into his computer, and frowned.
    “Did you purchase the vehicle here?”
    “It’s my boyfriend’s. Alton Wright?”
    The service guy stared at me for a couple seconds. What he saw was a girl wearing a Minnesota Twins baseball cap (my dad’s) that covered up all her arguably silky black hair.She was also wearing an oversize pair of Gucci sunglasses (my mom’s), a baby blue tunic top (also my mom’s), and lipstick (which I never wear). I was incognito.
    The guy typed in Alton’s name. He scrolled around a bit, then said, “I’ve got a Dennis Wright.”
    “That’s Alton’s dad. The car’s probably in his name.”
    “You know you could have just called this in,” he said. “We could have made a new key from the VIN number. Had it ready for you.”
    “Next time I throw my boyfriend’s spare keys in the lake, I’ll be